Directions:1. Slice the tomatoes 5mm-7mm thick, layer the sliced tomato on a wide dish. Dice the onion and sprinkle it evenly on top of the tomatoes.2. Mix vinegar and sugar together until all the sugar has dissolved.3. Pour all the vinegar mixture over the dish. Cover with plastic wrap, and chill in the fridge for 1 hour.4. Remove the cover, place thinly sliced avocado on top of the onion and tomatoes. Drizzle the oil over the avocado. Sprinkle the thyme, salt and pepper on top. EAT!

Salad is a regular on our dinner menu. Actually, I have some salad recipes I want to recommend. But if I keep posting salad recipes, I think somebody will start to say "Vegans only eat salad!" That's why I'm going to separate the posts and do it gradually! This time I used avocado and tomatoes with Japanese style sweet vinegar. The sweet vinegar is really nice with tomatoes! Please try it!

Vegan Memo:- You should use a large, deep dish, otherwise your fridge will be wet and full of the smell of vinegar (I did it.)- If you don't want to use any oil, it's yummy enough without the sesame oil.

Gyoza sauce:4 Tbls soya sauce3 Tsp rice vinegarChili oil if you want to make it spicy

Directions:1. Mince or dice finely the cabbage, mushrooms, carrot, garlic and ginger. Heat the sesame oil in a frying pan, add the minced cabbage, mushrooms, carrot, garlic, ginger and the pressed tofu. Once the vegetables start to soften, add the soya sauce, worcester sauce, sake and vegetable stock. Mix everything and cook a few mins to allow the flavours to blend.2. Add the potato starch a little at a time, mixing well. Turn off the heat, and leave the mixture until it's cool enough to touch.3. Fill the gyoza papers with the vegetable tofu mixture and press the edges together. (Click here to watch the video about how to make gyoza on youtube!)4. Heat the vegetable oil in a frying pan. Place the gyoza seam side up in the frying pan in two or three lines (depending on the size of your frying pan). Add a little water to the pan (up to around 1/3 of the height of gyoza). Cover the pan and cook over high heat.5. After almost all the water has gone, remove the lid and wait until the bottom of the gyoza brown and remaining water has cooked away. Mix the sauce ingredients, dip your gyoza and EAT!

I made this recipe with ingredients that can be found easily here and in Japan. This recipe can become your basic gyoza recipe I think! I use firm tofu instead of fake meat, but even if you don't use tofu it's still good. Cooking the vegetables before putting the mixture inside the gyoza helps to make them firmer. You should make a lot of gyoza and have a vegan gyoza party with you friends!!

Vegan Memo:- The vegetables will reduce by about half after cooking!- You can use any kind of mushrooms you like. - You can freeze and keep the leftover gyoza.

Directions:1. Mix pressed tofu, chili bean sauce, soya sauce, grated garlic, panko, salt and pepper in a bowl until well combined.2. Cut the stalks off the mushrooms, mince them and add to tofu filling.3. Put mushrooms upside-down, dust lightly with flour. Put a small ball of the tofu filling into each mushroom, making the shape by pressing softly. Dust filled mushrooms again with flour.4. Heat a little olive oil in a frying pan. Place the mushrooms tofu filling side down, cover pan with a lid, and fry mushrooms until browned. Flip the mushrooms over, cover and fry again. Squeeze lime over cooked mushrooms and EAT!

Mushrooms are one of our favourite foods. In Japan, we used to eat so many kinds of mushroom, like shimeji, enoki, shitake and maitake. But these kinds of mushroom are too expensive to buy every day in Scotland so that's why we are always eating the common white or brown ones. In this recipe, you can enjoy their nice flavour. The mushrooms flavor with the spicy tofu is the best match with beer!

Vegan Memo:- Please press the tofu well. I recommend you microwave the tofu for a couple of minutes before pressing. It's a trick we use in Japan to get the water out of the tofu. It's faster, I think!- Of course, you can use shitake mushrooms instead of white mushrooms!

Directions:1. Heat a little vegetable oil in a frying pan, add minced onion and carrot, fry until the carrot is soft.2. Place chickpeas in a bowl, mash them with the back of a fork.3. Place all other ingredients for the burger, fried onion and carrot into the bowl, and mix well. Separate mixture into 4 equal pieces, and shape into burgers.4. Fry burgers on both sides over medium heat.5. Mix the ingredients for the teriyaki sauce and pour from the corner of the frying pan, cooking over high heat. After the sauce reduces by half, take the burgers out and add the potato starch/water paste to the pan. Cook and mix for a short time until thickened and smooth. Spread sauce on the burgers. EAT!

I didn't make a vegan burger for a long time. It's easy for the mixture to get too dry if you use chickpeas for vegan burgers, but cooking with teriyaki sauce helps to makes it moist. The teriyaki sauce soaks into the burger a little bit and this burger is already flavoured, so you don't feel like you are eating beans. If you want to feel the chickpeas texture, you can leave some bits when you mash it. I decided to give the nutritional info for my recipes using Recipe Calculator from Spark Recipes, so please check it as well!

Vegan Memo:- You can use other kinds of beans I think, e.g black beans, soya beans and so on.- You can use dried basil instead of fresh basil if you don't have it.

Margarine to spread on the lasagna dish9 sheets of no pre-cooking lasagna sheet1 medium/large courgette

Directions:1. Make the meat sauce. Heat olive oil in deep frying pan, add minced garlic. Add minced onion after garlic starts to smell good. Once the onion starts to turn clear, add all other ingredients for the meat sauce, except salt and pepper, and cook for 15min. Add salt and pepper to taste.2. Make the white sauce. Heat margarine in a heavy bottom pot, add thinly sliced onion, fry well. After it starts to brown, add sliced mushrooms and flour, fry and stir until vegetables are evenly coated and flour is no longer powdery. Add soya milk, vegetable stock and miso, and cook it until it has thickened. Add salt and pepper to taste. 3. Spread margarine on the lasagna dish, place about 4 heaped Tbls of meat sauce in the dish and spread it out evenly. Add one big scoop of white sauce in the dish and smooth it out too. Place 3 lasagna sheets on top. After that, keep layering meat sauce, sliced courgette, white sauce and lasagna sheets in that order. The last layer should be white sauce (if you have access to vegan cheese, you can grate and add it to the last white sauce layer).4. Bake it for around 45min in 180 degrees. EAT!

The long ingredient list probably makes you feel like you don't want to make this, but the whole cooking process is actually quite easy so I can recommend this recipe for every one. This recipe makes me feel like dairy products are totally unnecessary. In fact, a non-vegetarian said she wouldn't be able to notice if it was vegan or not. You can add some layers of your favourite vegetables to this recipe. This time, the courgette became soft and juicy! You can use this meat sauce and white sauce for other recipes: e.g gratin, bolognese and so on. If you make too much, you can freeze and keep it in freezer.

Vegan Memo:- You can use any kind of mushrooms you like!- Please cook onion well for the white sauce. The sweetness of well cooked onion makes the white sauce nice!- Please check the lasagna to make sure it is not burning when it's in the oven.

Ingredients Tags:

I went to London last week. I'm going to post about the vegan life I experienced in London.

DAY 1

The first place we went was Vegan X which is owned by Secret Society of Vegans. Their name is already too cool. They are selling shoes, clothes. accessories, cakes, energy bar, drinks and so on. Of course these are all vegan. Our bags were too heavy, so we only got Luna Bar and cup cake this time. For dinner, we went to inSpiral. They have a little bit of a hippy-ish atmosphere, and food was really nice. There were around 10 kinds of ice cream and yummy looking cakes also!

DAY 2

It was my birthday, so Rebecca and Mark gave me a slice of peanut butter cheese cake from inSpiral! Vegan cheese cakes don't taste like tofu in this country. They taste like cheese cake! We went to Borough Market for lunch. It's a massive farmers market! Of course they are selling meat and cheese, but we can find the word, "Vegan", in so many places. And the vegetables looked so fresh. We got a cup of soup, and a vegan hamburger set from one of the stalls. The open atmosphere makes everything good! For my birthday dinner, we went to Saf. Everything is vegan and they are famous for the nice raw foods. It's expensive, so I would recommend this restaurant for vegans who want to have stylish vegan night out. I ate the "Trio of raw cheeses", "Seitan piccata and kale salad" and "butternut squash raw cheese cake", and almost died because of theirs incredible deliciousness...

DAY 3

We went to Brighton which I heard is a bit of vegan and vegetarian paradise. There are more than 10 vegetarian or vegan restaurants and cafes in the city centre that are close enough to walk to. For lunch today, I ate Thai curry at Food for Friends which was established in 1981. More than half of the dishes have vegan options. In the shopping area called the lanes, there is the shop of Vegetarian Shoes which is making high quality vegan faux leather shoes. We started to drink beer around 7pm in the pub, got takeout chips between the pubs, and enjoyed the traditional British unhealthy vegan life.

DAY 4

Sarah made oat pancakes for Mark and Rebecca for a nice Sunday brunch. After eating brunch, we went to Camden Market near inSpiral and found a vegan sweets stall selling massive sandwich cookies and chocolate cakes and brownies. It was too big to bite and made me feel happy! We also ate pita bread, hummus, baba ghanoush and beet salad in a middle eastern restaurant inside the market. Their baba ghanoush was the best ever in my life. We found both of them in massive market, so I don't know where they are now...

DAY 5

Last day. Before we leave London, Rebecca took us to an Indian vegetarian buffet restaurant called Indian Veg. It's only 4.50 for all-you-can-eat! Of course everything is vegetarian and almost all food was vegan! The walls are covered by vegetarian propaganda posters! It was like a dream world. I ate it until I almost died. The last is Vegan X again! We bought some stuff including Ms. Cupcake and went back to Scotland! At last, I want to say thank you to Rebecca, Mark and Owen!